Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 5 August 2022.
Art Moore make vivid, heartbreaking short stories. Each song on the newly formed three-piece’s self-titled debut album is its own individual universe of bittersweet feeling: a brief snapshot of a moment in time that captures the fragility and occasional impossibility of human connection. The ten tracks that comprise the record are deft character studies, zeroing in on restless widows, shy beginners, jilted friends and friendly exes, chronicling minute moments — road trips, casual dates, games of truth or dare — with rich detail and subtle wit. The result is a world of remarkable emotional complexity, an album-length study of loneliness, heartache, and loss that’s sweet but never saccharine, sad but never maudlin. Featuring the inimitable songwriting of beloved Oakland luminary Taylor Vick of Boy Scouts set in sharp relief against lush production from Ezra Furman collaborators Sam Durkes and Trevor Brooks, it’s a quietly wondrous record — a set of songs that sketch out the struggle and beauty of coping with everyday life.
The Danish String Quartet’s Grammy-nominated Prism project, linking Bach fugues, Beethoven quartets and works by later masters, receives its fourth installment. The penultimate volume of the series combines Bach’s Fugue in G minor from the Well-Tempered Clavier (in the arrangement by Viennese composer Emanuel Aloys Förster) with Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 132 and Felix Mendelssohn’s String Quartet No.2 (composed in 1827). As Paul Griffiths observes in the liner notes, these pieces “sound all the more remarkable for the exquisite brilliance and precision of the Danish players”.
Lee Bains + The Glory Fires have released Old-Time Folks, their fourth full-length studio album, via Don Giovanni Records. Since releasing their first album There Is a Bomb in Gilead in 2012, the road-worn Birmingham, Alabama band – singer and guitarist Lee Bains, bassist Adam Williamson, and drummer Blake Williamson – has built a reputation as being what NPR calls “punks revved up by the hot-damn hallelujah of Southern rock” who carry on “the Friday-night custom of burning down the house,” a raw live sound that they captured with Texas punk producer Tim Kerr on studio albums Dereconstructed (2014) and Youth Detention (2017) before recording a full-on live album at their favorite hometown dive, Live at the Nick (2019).
For the past 5 years, Marta Cikojevic – a.k.a. Marci – has played keyboard in the Montréal-based band TOPS, a group known for their catchy and thoughtful indie pop. On her self-titled debut album, produced and written with TOPS bandmate David Carriere, Cikojevic emerges spotlight-ready, helming delightful pop songs, replete with syncopated guitar patterns, lush, layered backing vocals, and feverish drums. On Marci, feeling good reigns paramount, and each track finds new ways to inspire pleasure. The album’s singles “Immaterial Girl” and “Entertainment” signpost its infectious energy, both dominated by funky basslines and plucky riffs.
London based 8-piece band Kokoroko have dropped their long-awaited debut album Could We Be More via Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood Recordings. Could We Be More is an expansive and ambitious album that speaks to the force of Kokoroko. Each song possesses the energy which so naturally underpins the heartbeat of Kokoroko’s identity – deftly moving through afrobeat, highlife, soul, and funk across the album’s 15 tracks and taking inspiration from a plethora of other influences from within the West-African and Caribbean communities that the band grew up listening to – the album gifts the listener feelings of homecoming and joy.
Imagine a series of rooms. Imagine a figure, permanently asleep. Imagine him firing beams of light, walking through each. Imagine his targets are:
–the inside of the skull of Descartes;
–the vestibules of the crypts of New Orleans;
–a mass in which the gospel is silence;
–a palace where one room disappears.
This is the world of Sleepwalker, the second release of the duo Hourloupe. If their debut, Future Deserts, was a journey through collapsed time, combining ancient sounds with our burning world, Sleepwalker is one through expanding space. In twenty-four minutes — eleven interlaced songs and texts — the listener looks through the eyes of a figure navigating a series of scenes: not so much to destroy monsters that lurk as to study them. Determine whether they are actually monsters or the reflections of things we long for and dread… when no one else is looking.
With Gusto is the sophomore record from Eggy, out now through Flightless Records. It’s got saxophone, strings, sandpaper, synths, carpet, piano, samples, feedback, surrealism and synergy. Pure EGGY.
Other reviews you might enjoy:
- New music round-up (for w/e 14 May 2021)
- New music round-up
- New music round-up (for w/e 21 October 2022)
David Edwards is the editor of The Blurb and a contributor on film and television
